I just played a session of Rift, and dinged level 52 finally. I’ve finished all the story quests and investigation/clicking things quests for Cape Jule and City Core yet I only just made level 52. I guess I’m supposed to be doing some dungeons or rifts/invasions as well.

The XP curve does seem a bit steep given that the bulk of the playerbase, like WoW and other similar games, is expected to sit at cap for the vast majority of the lifetime of an expansion. Guild Wars 2 has a flat leveling curve so we’re finding the levels go by quickly when we find time to actually play. But going back to Rift after a session or two in GW2 really hits home how the more standard exponential XP curve gets pretty steep.

I wonder how Rift compares to other games in this regard? I have the feeling that LoTRO is pretty punishing from level 30 onwards, leveling takes a long time. Time-wise I’m spending a lot of time doing the carnage quests (kill X creatures) when actually they give about 50% of the equivalent experience for an investigation quest in the same area. I suppose you get the kill XP to balance that but it seems a bad time investment in comparison.

Interesting rift variation

I actually dinged while closing a rift with a random player near to Tulan in Cape Jule. It stood out as a rather different take on the usual. We had to use our planar energy to buff this rebellious denizen of the plane of fire (similar to the onslaught quest type from Ember Isle). Then we had to jump on his friends to wake them up (I kid you not!) and defend the group from waves of angry fire creatures. It was a funny rift sequence and a nice light-hearted note to end the session on.

11 Responses to Rift: ding! and leveling speed

You must be missing something. My cleric’s level 51.6 and is still in Cape Jule with at least 1 story quest to go, maybe more. I’ve done 1 IA, helped with a couple of hunt rifts. Everything else has been the standard quests I’ve found as I’ve run around plus the carnages. Though now that I think about it, I took the cleric to Pelladane first and did 3 or 4 quests there plus a couple of carnages.

My warrior’s about 51.2, has several areas of Cape Jule to go to still that the cleric’s been to but the warrior has not yet, and the warrior never went to Pelladane.

My mage is 50.7 and came to Cape Jule at level 48. Still not done with Cape Jule, never been to Pelladane, but is also a crafter so did a daily and made the run up through Eastern Holdings to drop off and did a single quest worth 60K XP to find the portals in that zone, but is now back in Cape Jule. I expect I’ll be 51 easily on this toon before thinking about moving to a different zone.

My rogue hit 48 in Shimmersand last night so I jumped over to Cape Jule. I’m now 48.8 on her and she’s still working through the quests based out of Tulan — just “drove back the invaders” from the docks and now needs to go find the Storm Legion’s base camp.

Of course, 48-50 needs about 800K XP, and 50-51 needs about 2.2 million, so it’s a steep change. Even so, on both the cleric and the warrior is seemed to take about 4 hours to get from 50-51, which I don’t think is unreasonably long at all. For my play schedule that’s about 2-3 days per level, and capped out in about a month per character. Feels decent to me.

Pretty much the carnage quests I think. I found a load I hadn’t done in the Core area, bearing in mind I’m talking about level 51->52. Means a whole lot of creature grinding to make up for what I skipped

That still seems odd that you’re barely pushing 52 after 2 full zones, though, when I’m almost 52 in a single zone. Or maybe I’m closer to the end of Cape Jule than I think and City Core is really small?

City core is much smaller, I had no issue leveling to 51 in Cape Jule, it’s in City Core that I was suddenly through the zone and still a good 30% XP off of dinging 52. The other zones seem a lot larger so it’s probably an isolated problem, though I have read on the forums about how slow 58-60 is.

You could always bip over to Pelladane too — it also begins at 50, so that’s another full zone to give xp for more early leveling.

I was on my rogue last night in Cape Jule at 48.8. Started to do a few quests to move the story along when a 57 cleric came and opened a hunt rift next to me, so I joined up with him. I was 49.3 when the rift was closed, so that was about 200K xp. Then he did a 2nd one and that took me to about 49.6, so it was about another 200K xp in all. I can see why people say that doing hunt rifts is a quick way to level. Get in a raid that’s popping them left and right and it wouldn’t take long to get the 2 million-ish xp for a level.

The last 40% to level 50 felt like it crawled by as a result of the 2 huge chunks from the hunt rifts. but I made 50, so now I have each archetype at 50+ in Rift now. Go me!

Grats! I never got a second character near that high but then I don’t play enough hours to keep a stable of characters going. I have a warrior that I loved playing but he’s languishing in the late 20s I think.

I was also sort of assuming I could level on one of the two continents, perhaps foolishly, but certainly from an alt perspective it’d be nice to have two separate storylines to work through on different characters.

Believe it or not, I have a 2nd cleric at 50 also. I originally went Defiant and loved cleric, got it to 50, etc. Then some friends started playing. As Guardians. On a different server. And this was before server transfers and emailing your alts cross-faction, etc. So I essentially started Rift over to play with them, this time as a Guardian. I think I still have a mid-30’s warrior and mage on the Defiant side somewhere too.